slang/slant

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 12:07 PM 10/28/2006, you wrote:
>At 3:43 PM +0000 10/28/06, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>>For "slang" you say "sl&N?"  Strange notation.
>>
>>M-w.com foespelz (phonetically/phonemically spells) "fun" as "f&n", so in
>>that notation you would be saying "slung" for "slang".  No one says that.
>
>If you checked out the earlier posts (just yesterday, I believe)
>about the ASCII representation of IPA, you'd have seen that & is used
>in that system not for a schwa (or "caret") but for the low front
>vowel for which the IPA symbol is the digraph corresponding to [ae].
>Lots of ones say that for "slang", or at least something closer to
>the lax vowel of "slant" than the tense vowel of "saint", including
>many northeasterners like me.
>
>>But you don't seem to be takingt his seriously ("the hell with it").  I've
>>focused on it to get it right because of my phoneme analysis books.
>>
>>These things can be tested.  One can play the m-w.com spoken words for
>>"dangle, danger, dants"  which one has the different "a" vowel sound.  I
>>hear "dance" with a short vowel and the others with a long vowel. Thus the
>>notation for "dangle" should be long a.
>
>What does this "test" other than the pronunciation of whoever
>happened to be used to record those words by m-w.com?
>
>LH
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

Good point, and it's high time someone said this.  My Minnesota speech
would be out, and California speech (with its ah/awe merger) would
definitely be out, etc. etc.  So whose speech is "the chosen
one"?  Dictionary makers aren't the arbiters of "best" speech; they just
try (imperfectly) to reflect what they hear.  If they make tapes, they
ought to add a caveat on the potential variation from their models; do they?

Look, no one is against helping kids learn to read, by whatever means
work.   What we linguists object to is your insistence on ONE perfect
pronunciation, and one that perfectly matches the spelling system--an
impossible dream!  Kids CAN learn to read without "perfectly" matching
letters to sounds, and without aiming for the sounds of some distant
idealized speaker!

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org